Six months into her new job as president of Parkland USA, Donna Sanker has hit the ground running. She reset the U.S. leadership team, started a deep-dive assessment of the business, visited convenience stores across the country—and ate some squirt cheese and Pop Rocks along the way.
Sanker moved from Southern California to Calgary shortly before the COVID-19 pandemic started to take the job of president of Parkland’s Canadian business. She was there for about three years before switching to the U.S. side in January after Doug Haugh left the position. Before Parkland, Sanker was chief operating officer at bp, most recently leading its West Coast retail business.
A Calgary, Alberta-based fuel supplier and c-store operator, Parkland Corp. has more than 650 retail outlets and more than 1,830 dealer sites. In the United States, it has more than 210 stores in 13 states, mostly in the West. Sanker (pictured above) works out of the company’s Houston base, which is central to the western states the business serves, like North Dakota, Montana, Idaho, Colorado, Utah—and Florida, which Parkland USA has grown significantly in over the last couple of years.
“I worked in a number of different parts of the business, always downstream, and I always found my way back to the retail business,” Sanker told CSP Daily News in a July 6 interview. “I say my heart belongs to retail. You got to have the stomach for it, but I love the business. It's so dynamic, it's always changing.”
Initial Changes
Sanker is taking much of her Canadian experience and bringing it to the United States. In Canada, she expanded the On the Run brand to more than 500 locations and helped grow the business through acquisitions, including 156 Husky gas station and c-store locations from Cenovus Energy Inc. in December 2021. She launched an electric vehicle (EV) network. And she unified Parkland’s Canadian businesses as one national business, rather than regionally, which is a challenge for a company that has grown primarily through acquisitions.
In the United States, one of the first changes she made was to separate the commercial business from the retail business. Previously, Parkland USA was run through Regional Operating Centers, and an ROC would run retail and commercial operations in their region. Instead, Sanker decided to put all retail business under one umbrella and commercial business under another umbrella in the United States.
“And the reason that I did that is really so that we could get the sort of maximum benefit of the scale of a national business again, as opposed to running things regionally,” she said. “If you have a best practice in Idaho, you can apply it in Florida, whereas before, that was a little more difficult.”
With that came personnel changes. Jay Erickson, who was chief operating officer for Parkland USA, was slated to take over as vice president of retail, Sanker said, but he passed away in March.With the new simplified leadership structure, Parkland USA does not plan on filling a COO position. But Peter Kilty (pictured above with Sanker), who has worked with Parkland Canada for the past 11 years, is serving as interim vice president of retail until that role is filled permanently, Sanker said.
- Parkland USA is No. 37 on CSP’s 2023 Top 202 ranking of U.S. convenience-store chains by company-owned store count.
Kilty and Sanker have gone on a tour of Parkland USA c-stores to assess what’s working and what’s not. Part of this includes trying snacks, especially ones Kilty can’t get in Canada: “We have tried everything you could possibly imagine,” Sanker said.
Aside from tasting snacks on the road, Kilty and Sanker are assessing the business. Parkland USA has great team members and some great assets, but some of the stores “need a little love and attention. We need some investment,” she said.
“What I would say after six months on the job is that we see a lot of opportunity and a lot of upside in the business,” she said. “But to me it's really about some of the fundamentals of running a good retail business. And so, using data and analytics around fuel pricing, around category management and merchandising. And then the basics of labor, shrink, credit card. ... managing those credit card expenses, the labor expenses and using good tools and systems to run the business.”
Looking Ahead
When asked what Parkland USA has planned in terms of future acquisitions, new store builds and divestments, Sanker said there will likely be a combination of all of the above. Sanker said she looks at assets by separating them into sites that are rock stars, ones that require investment and others that are less strategic or underperforming.
Sanker said Parkland will likely continue its strategy of growing through acquisitions over new builds, but it will depend on the market.
“We've looked at where we have scale or density, and then we're looking at ways to fill in to actually get more at scale, and then also potentially looking at adjacent geographies where we can utilize our supply advantage from a fuel perspective to supplement the network,” she said.
As to whether it plans on keeping the names of the brands it acquires or changing them to On the Run-branded stores: “Stay tuned, and we’ll have a more definitive position in the coming months,” Sanker said.
Looking back at her journey in Canada, Sanker said she felt like at the end of her tenure there she had built one team and a robust retail business. For what she expects of her U.S. role, “I expect three years time to look back and kind of say, ‘Wow, that was really hard.’ But that we've built a successful, robust, profitable retail business, and a brand and a position that we feel proud of that's got some materiality in the market,” she said.
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